Olympic Pipeline Company Opposes Transmission Lines Over Its Pipelines For Several Reasons, Including Safety

In a letter to Newcastle CAG representative Dave Edmonds, Olympic Pipeline Company’s Project Manager, Kim West, states the PSE “route selection will be our prime concern for a variety of reasons including safety, impact to landowners, future maintenance, and customer impacts to name just a few. Therefore we feel that segments B, F, H, and L best address the concerns mentioned above.” See the whole letter here.

It should be obvious that during construction and thereafter, doubling the power of the transmission lines to 230,000 volts right above the same gas, jet fuel and diesel oil pipelines that exploded in Bellingham in 1999, killing 3 youths, is an insanely unacceptable risk to human life and limb. Yet PSE has irresponsibly narrowed the public choice to either the L or M segments as the terminus of the 18 mile project because those are the paths of least resistance and optimum convenience to PSE due to several existing (and overburdened) easements it already owns. PSE admits these poor choices present “many challenges,” but public safety and sound engineering practices take a back seat to PSE’s bulldozing this project to an artificial deadline regardless of whatever the public says or thinks.